


In Spite of Despair

by ishtarelisheba



Series: Better to Face the Bullets 'verse [3]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Shell Shock, Suicidal Thoughts, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-17
Updated: 2016-08-17
Packaged: 2018-08-08 02:55:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7740652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishtarelisheba/pseuds/ishtarelisheba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One-shot set immediately before the main 'verse begins. Suffering and alone, Rummond comes the closest he ever did to ending himself. (Great big tw for suicidal thoughts and actions. If the scenario is triggering for you, you might want to avoid this particular ficlet.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Spite of Despair

**Author's Note:**

> _Prompt - Anonymous said: In BTFTB could we see more about what was going on in Rummond's life right before he admitted himself to the hospital?_

He sat on the side of the bed, service revolver in hand. The barrel rested against his left palm, heavier than he remembered it being. He had been holding it long enough that the steel had warmed to his skin. It felt almost a part of him at this point, as often as he’d thought of it and held it over the last few days.

Rummond had held out as long as he could. Clinging by teeth and nails. Fifteen months of fighting his way through days and nights, days and nights. Nightmares and hallucinations of blood and fire and smoke and dead boys and forest so dense and dark that the trees choked him. Hunger that his mind wouldn’t allow him to feed gnawed at his insides. He was weary of it. Exhausted by struggling to hold onto empty air.

He could have withstood it as long as he’d had a home. His wife, his son. Someone to slog through Hell for, to reach out toward. They were gone, though, and ‘home’ had gone with them.

He’d screamed and cried into the musty pillow that was on the bed when he hired the flat, aching and mourning until his voice had gone and he could do nothing save lie limp and stare at the cracks in the wall as though they could give him anything. And he couldn’t do it any longer.

Rummond closed his hand around the barrel, wrapping his fist weakly around it. It would have been the roof, but he didn’t think he had the strength for the stairs any longer. Turning the gun so that the barrel trained on him, he opened his mouth. He felt the metal grinding across his front teeth as he slid it in. The front sight scraped the roof of his mouth. 

He closed his eyes, clenched them shut. Rummond wondered if he would feel it. Would he hear the _bang?_ Would the click of the hammer make him startle? Everything did, now. 

He moved his thumb to rest on the trigger. It gave as he squeezed.

_He didn’t want to die._

Rummond let the gun fall from his mouth. 

His hands rested in his lap. He hadn’t thought there could possibly have been more tears left in him, but a sob tore itself from his throat. He dropped the revolver on the bed next to him and curled in on himself, shaking.

He didn’t want to die. He just wanted it to stop. The pain that clawed through his chest, the things in his head, the things he saw, the way he missed his family, _everything._ He wanted to be all right again. He wanted to be able to _breathe_ again without feeling as if a locomotive crushed the air from him. He wanted to see his son again. He wanted to hold Neal and hear his voice. And he would never have so much as a chance of doing those things again if he killed himself.

Rummond raked his hands through his hair, holding onto fistfuls at the nape of his neck. He had to _do_ something. He’d come so close.

There was a hospital out near Oxford. He’d heard of men like him handing themselves over into its care and coming back out nearer alive than they’d gone in. It cost dearly, but if begging for the money in the one place he’d sworn he would never set foot again meant he had even the slightest chance of seeing his boy again… 

The revolver clattered when he set it on the bedside table. Rummond slid off the thin mattress, going down on his knees to pull his kit bag out from beneath the bed, and knelt back up to upend it on the blanket. He hadn’t so much as looked at its contents since he’d been shipped home. He’d only brought it with him to the tenement out of habit, really. At least it would be of some use.

It took him some time, the back and forth of it, and he felt as if he slogged through knee deep mud to do it, but he found what things might need and crammed them into the bag as quickly as he could. He left the creased little photograph propped against the base of the kerosene lamp next to the bed until last. Rummond picked it up carefully, as though it were worth a fortune more than the chemicals and paper it was made of. He looked at it for a moment, fingertips brushing longingly over his son’s smiling face, and placed it in his wallet for safekeeping.

He could do this. He had to.


End file.
